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Comment by rs186 | Hacker News Reader

The post does not mention how much money they are giving. Maybe I am a pessimist, but unless the number is in tens of millions or hundreds of millions (very unlikely), I don't think it helps the development of an independent browser very much. Google probably has poured over billions of dollars into Chrome development over the years, and if you look at what Chrome supports, it's massive. I seriously doubt anybody else can match their feature set, not to mention involvement in drafting the latest standards.

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LuaJIT was developed by one person. Ladybird doesn't need hundreds of millions of dollars, it needs interpreter specialists who are willing to lend their time to the project, and an army of volunteers to work on the rest of the rendering engine.

why do you think the js interpreter is that special compared to all the rest? AFAIU, CSS is a much more complex beast, as the spec has not been written to reflect the way it could be implemented

Writing JS JITs is a specialized skill that requires a deep knowledge of compilers, JavaScript, and CPU architectures.

CSS is complicated but it's not as complex. It's just a matter of throwing enough sufficiently competent developers at the problem.

Ladybird doesn't even have a JIT right now. They used to, but it got taken out because as best as I can tell, nobody on the project knows how to write one.

So you want people to work for free on one of the most complex pieces of software in existence? Why wouldn't you want to give those people hundreds of millions of dollars?

And if you think that writing a JS interpreter is the only hard part of a browser engine, have I got news for you.

My point was not that people/companies shouldn't donate money to the Ladybird project, but that an equally effective way of contributing is to contribute time, especially the time of developers with specialized skills that would otherwise be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at market rates.

Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it.

> Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it.

Why would they work for free even given this? It's not something you hack on in an evening or two

LuaJIT has ~85k lines of code. Chromium and Firefox have somewhere in the neighborhood of ~30 million. If you need ~1 developer for "a LuaJIT" then you need ~350 developers for a browser.

The assumption that a browser needs ~30 million lines of code may be false.

It may be possible for a scripting language with at least the same features as LuaJIT to be as fast as LuaJIT in less than 85K lines of code.

$100k

https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1970160706650595592

So that's like... almost nothing compared to what's needed for browser development.

If I understand it correctly, Ladybird uses Skia. So they are also benefiting from those "billions poured over Chrome".

Go look at what the Ladybird project has accomplished with much fewer resources. Ladybird will soon be as good as Firefox.

For relative definitions of "soon" and depending on the feature you use. I'd say it's probably 2 years or so away from being a real competitive option to FF/Chrome.

Clearly you haven't been following what Ladybird's team have been doing in the last months. With almost no resources, they've created this web engine that is almost at par with the giants.

The "almost" is very load bearing there... It's not remotely competitive with blink/webkit/gecko yet, be it for features support or performance.

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